If you hear “fucking” as a adjective, as in “Fucking James Franco is everywhere,” you might not care for the actor/artist/adman/Tennessee Williams karaoke judge. If you hear it as a verb, then you, my little cuttlefish, jumped right to sex, which is why we’re friends.

Upon reading that there is a Kickstarter-funded anthology of short fiction in the works about made-up sexual encounters with Mr. Franco, one that surpassed its $2k goal by more than my rent, I thought a lot of things. The first was that while there might be a lot of luscious erotic art lurking between the Francophilic covers, I kind of hoped most of it would be hilariously nasty and that when the book is done that Beavis and Butthead will favor us with a dramatic reading (now that idea deserves a Kickstarter).

And then I wondered what James Franco thinks about it. He must know — you’d think one’s publicist would keep one abreast of that kind of thing and he doesn’t exactly seem like a hot-house flower who would faint dead away at the prospect of people making their keyboards sticky with him in mind. And while, on one hand, being the object of lust for the masses, or at least enough masses to make you book-worthy, is flattering, it could also seriously creep you out… like getting a really long and specific mash note from someone you wouldn’t touch with a Finglonger.

SexIs’ Kal Cobalt took an excellent and in-depth look at Real Person Slash (RPS) as a long time participant in slash communities in 2009 and had this to say about the downside of it: “RPS may cause real harm to the celebrities involved by invoking emotional distress. They may feel misrepresented, at best, or horrified by the depictions of themselves fucking friends, band members, or co-stars, at worst,” and also that search engines can skew towards RPS, potentially freaking out fans.

The good part, Kal says, is that it’s good for their careers. And that’s true. James Franco may not have been the last thing on my mind, but he probably wasn’t in the top 1000 and yet here I am writing about him because other people are planning to.

There’s plenty of RPS on the web if you’re looking for it and it’s funny how, as Kal writes, that for some people — me being one of them evidently — there is an odd feeling of crossing a line. This isn’t to say I haven’t done that kind of fantasizing myself; maybe not about James Franco, but there’s something about committing it to paper that would make me feel weird. Maybe because it would nudge it toward reality and reality is what fantasy is supposed to take you away from. If real life was as good as those tiresome optimists are always selling it as (a “Life is good” dog bed will set you back $50, and your dog can’t even read), we wouldn’t need a bottomless well of materials to elude it, from porn to Disney to Fucking James Franco.

Interestingly, though, while I’ve done plenty of celebrity fantasizing and writing it down would feel ooky to me, I can honestly say it’s never occurred to me to fantasize about a fictional character. And yet the classic slash fiction — Kirk/Spock, Holmes/Watson, Sam/Frodo — seems innocuous and whimsical. It’s pretty contrary to have the one I do feel less comfortable to me than the one I don’t. That may just be part of the nature of fantasy: it’s something you’re not always meant to bring into real life.

This was all borne on me when I realized that I have been obsessed with Sherlock Holmes (played by anyone) and that it was the first time I’ve ever had an obsession with a man that wasn’t of a sexual nature. WTF could that be all about? On consideration the idea started to seem a little more appealing… Holmes is generally portrayed as having little interest in women and if you were going to seduce a fictional character what could be more intriguing than someone so alluringly inscrutable, or inscrewable?

For a recent SexCult column I took an informal survey of what celebrities people found to be the sexiest and discovered that most of their ideas about allure had little in common with Hollywood’s. Wondering what other people thought about this fictional character business I took another informal poll (I asked on Facebook): “What fictional character would you most like to hook-up with?”

The coolest thing about polls like this is that the answers are so varied, a person can get two votes and be considered way ahead in the race. The second coolest thing is… who was way out in front in this poll? Not Kirk. Not Spock. Not Frodo.

Atticus Finch.

Atticus Finch, you may recall from your ninth grade reading class, was the just and brilliant country lawyer in To Kill A Mockingbird and either my FB friends are serious literati or want to bang Gregory Peck, who played him in the movie. “Sexy, smart, fair and a great father,” one person wrote, making me think maybe it was more the former. Atticus tied with Han Solo, each getting three votes… and something tells me they’ll end up together in a slash story after someone who is adept at that kind of thing reads this.

As far as women, cartoon characters ranked pretty high with Jessica Rabbit sweeping the category with two votes, tied Ginger and Mary Ann, as a package. For more animated ladies, Jean Grey, Six of One from Tripping the Rift, Betty Rubble and Luann from King of the Hill, made the cut. The Virgin Mary made it into the mix, though I suspect a prankster, but Aphrodite/Venus was an imaginative choice — who could show you a better time than the goddess of love herself? Xena, Warrior Princess and Leloo from the Fifth Element got a nod. There was a vintage vote for Honey West and an uber vintage vote for Hester Prynne.

Severus Snape and Sherlock Holmes tied for the silver in the men’s division with two votes a piece, but also making intriguing showings were Dexter, Mr. Darcy, Wolverine, Howard Roark, Thor, LeStat (who would have swept this thing in the 80’s), Tyler Durden, Valentine Michael Smith, from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Stephen Maturin, Bruce Wayne (not Batman, Bruce Wayne). Alobar from the novel Jitterbug Perfume was a choice that convinced me not everyone was looking at the actors playing the characters… since no one, to my knowledge, has ever played Alobar. That idea was compromised with the choice of The Goblin King, “aka David Bowie in tight pants.”

Undoubtedly some of those characters made the slash pages back when people were swapping stories they wrote on typewriters, but some were certainly a surprise and I’m kind of glad I’ll never be Sherlock enough to figure out our attractions completely. As some fantasies are better as fantasies, some mysteries just get more alluring the less able you are to solve them. I wonder what James Franco fantasizes about? Twenty bucks says that we’ll see a book about it one day. And it won’t be written by James Franco.